Connecting to the past: MSA, other companies highlight history with exhibits

Not every company can look back and remember how one of its core products was developed in conjunction with one of the world’s greatest inventors.

So when 97-year-old Mine Safety Appliances Co. began planning to move its headquarters office from O’Hara Township to its new corporate center in Cranberry, the company’s leadership took the opportunity to establish an in-house exhibit. It’s located in a main hall longer than a football field and showcases a rich past that includes the invention of the electric gas hat, a miner’s helmet designed in collaboration with Thomas Edison.

Mark Deasy, director of communications for MSA, said the electric helmet replaced helmets that used gas lamps, which often helped spark explosions in coal mines. Edison was said to refer to the electric helmet as the one invention he felt did the most for humanity — it saved a number of lives by reducing mine explosions by 75 percent.

The company debuted its historic exhibit in its new building at the beginning of the year.

“It’s been very gratifying to see visitors come in to the building and spend time reading and taking in all this information with a degree of interest and amazement,” said Deasy, who said he’s learned a lot just from working on the project. “It makes you proud to be an MSA employee.”

‘What’s the company about?’

It was a project that required a six-figure commitment from the company and a willingness to hire outside help to pull off. MSA worked with its architect for the building, Downtown-based The Design Alliance, on the project, and with East Liberty-based Idea Mill to design and craft a comprehensive display of the company’s history and its product.

Marty Powell, a principal of The Design Alliance, said his firm is seeing more clients interested in exhibiting their company’s past in museum-like displays.

“Many of our corporate clients are interested in telling their mission story in a more vivid way,” Powell said. “We’re doing increasingly more of it.”

Along with his firm’s work with MSA and other clients that include American Eagle Outfitters, Del Monte and Heinz, Powell said The Design Alliance has been working with computer giant IBM on helping to better brand its software service centers.

For IBM, it’s about presenting something in private workplaces to educate employees new to the company, Powell said.

Whether it’s branding, providing education or an acculturation of staff, Powell said, “It does connect to mission. What’s the company about and where is it going?”

‘part of their branding’

MSA isn’t alone among local companies to establish in-house exhibits showcasing their pasts. CONSOL Energy, with a long history in the coal business, established its own company museum at its new headquarters at Southpointe, which it occupied a few years ago.

Perhaps the region’s best known brand, H.J. Heinz Co., took another route, with affiliated foundations working to establish the Senator John Heinz History Center in the Strip District. The company established a modest section of the 270,000-square-foot facility to showcase Heinz’s rich history as a food company.

Andy Masich, president and CEO of the Heinz History Center, said companies take different approaches to their histories.

“Companies who appreciate their past — it’s a part of their branding — do find different ways to celebrate that history,” said Masich, who noted his institution’s library maintains the archives of hundreds of Pittsburgh-area businesses from past and present. “Some do it in publications and films. Some do it with exhibits.”

Engaging employees, customers

For the MSA project, Powell said the company’s product line of a wide variety of safety equipment provided a rich storyline.

“The stories are so compelling and so moving because they’re saving lives. They reach out and grab you in a way that ordinary brands can’t,” he said. “It’s made more vivid at Mine Safety because it’s human.”

Deasy said the project started with a much smaller display area, a wide collection of the company’s products kept throughout the years, and a blank sheet of paper on which it brainstormed ideas.

What started as a static display turned into something more engaging, said Deasy, employing video, actual products as well as their prototypes, and human interest stories of the people who used them.

There was the white leather helmet signed by members of the New York Fire Department presented to an MSA sales representative after the Sept. 11 attacks, for which the company shipped three truckloads of equipment to ground zero. There’s the original canary cages, recalling a primitive era of coal mining in which canaries were taken into the mines to detect the presence of gas.

While the impact of the company’s extensive new display isn’t one that can be directly measured in terms of marketing value or corporate performance, Deasy said it helps remind employees what the company exists to do and shows to visitors what they can expect.

“I think what it does is it kind of reaffirms their trust they put in MSA, realizing where we’ve come from and what we’ve accomplished,” he said.